poem

 A Gift

It isn’t your birthday 

Or the anniversary of anything special

But I felt this urge to get you a gift.

I read every overwrought

Card in the aisle

And bought the least worst,

The one without flowers,

Of course.

I spent hours on-line

Scrolling through all the things

I know you like until

I found the one you will.  

This is all nice and sweet.

You’ll smile and affect a blush

But I know the thing you really need.

I'm not that daft.

You need to read something I write,

even if just a rough draft,

that expresses precisely

how lovely and beautiful

how impossibly perfect you are

to me, how lovely

how good you are to

to me

how bursting with

mystical energy

You are  

                      to me

just the way

you are to me

et cetera

et cetera

etc

My love is the opposite

of the deepest hate,

the ravenous hunger

you cannot sate,

the empty canvas

looming over a puddle

of spilled paint.

It is the raucous opposite

of my ear against a grave.

Take all the nothingness

of the voids of space,

the insentient un-belonging

of a stray beam of light

emitted from a long dead star

wending its way toward you

from galaxies away

and know the opposite shore 

of that eventual midnight shimmer

is the magnitude of my love for you 

But this is a gift 

for which there are no words,

like struggling to package

the lissome grace of moonlight 

into the shadows of a box

when the moon itself

is a cold dead rock

I can only sign the card

Love, me

And hope for the best.

Maybe if you read it out loud

I’ll know that it's true

So go on then,

whisper if you can.

Read it to me

hushed

and I will listen

8/1/21